Without Warning

The former Tomb Raider team returns with a 24-inspired action game for Capcom.

One of Capcom's main announcements at the company's press event this week was that they will be publishing the first game from Circle Studios, the newly formed development house made up of former Core Design employees. That game, Without Warning, was also on display, and while it mixes elements from a few different genres, it's primarily an action-shooter with a story oriented twist.

With the developers citing the television show 24 as an inspiration, Without Warning's big hook is that the player will control six different characters as each of them experience many of the same parts of an overall timeline. Because of the timeline focus, you may see an event happen with one character from one angle, and then see the same event happen later on from a different perspective.

In total, players will get to control six different characters in the game, three Delta Force soldiers and three civilians, but to make the timeline hook work best, players will not choose which character to play at ay point -- there will be a scripted order to make the story flow naturally. Or at least, as naturally as it can given the promised story twists along the way. "One minute you'll be playing one of the Delta guys for maybe 10 minutes, then you'll switch and you may play Tanya for five minutes, then switch back and play a Delta guy for half an hour, so we try to add the variety of the gameplay into the whole experience," says Circle's Managing Director Jeremy Heath-Smith. "We've kind of mapped it out, and we hope the maximum will be half an hour, and that will be one of the Delta guys, to a minimum of about 10 minutes."

Due to the focus on story, the Delta Force characters will all carry the same one weapon that allows normal machine gun fire, sniping, and grenade launching. This simplicity gets taken even further with some of the civilian characters, as one has only a camera and another doesn't have any weapons at all (at least for much of the game). While the developers are careful to state that the game won't be a stealth title, there will be instances in using the civilian characters where you have to play cautiously.

Given the six character setup, Heath-Smith also notes another '24' inspiration. "Maybe all six characters don't survive," he says. "They don't all have to get to the end of the game, do they?" This leads into the idea of having a central hero in the game, which Heath-Smith didn't want to do from a branding perspective, but can't seem to help but do in the story itself. "I think with the timing of when Capcom will launch this game and where the hardware platform is, it's too much to ask to try to launch yet another hero," he says. "What we're launching here is a game. Will somebody stand out as the hero in this game? Wait 'til you've played it...every game needs a hero."

Beyond Without Warning, Circle Studios has two more games planned for this generation of consoles, though right now Without Warning is the only one far enough along to have a publisher attached. "We think we can do two more games on this generation [of hardware] after Without Warning. We kind of want to spin the technology and not miss that window that all the publishers missed at the last changing of hardware...there's still a lot of mileage. Publishers still want PlayStation 2 software...we're talking about two games in the next 14 months."

Head over to our media index page to see the first screens of Without Warning or the downloads section to check out the first trailer, and we'll be back with more on the game soon.